I'm all for the existence of fully open options for people whose opsec requires full control of the stack and/or for techies who can handle it. But there's a di

I'm all for the existence of fully open options for people whose opsec requires full control of the stack and/or for techies who can handle it. But there's a disturbing tendency for people to throw more shade on the people, organizations, and technologies that get things almost perfect than they do on the ones that aren't even trying. Signal has managed to create a product that is so easy to use that my non-technical brother-in-law got my wife's entirely-non-technical family to choose it over various Facebook properties and other clearly-worse-than-Signal for-profit chat apps. That's extremely impressive, and part of what makes that level of ease of use possible is that there's only one Signal server. In the absence of Signal someone like my brother-in-law wouldn't have been able to navigate Matrix himself, much less help my mother-in-law to do so—in the end he would have pointed everyone at WhatsApp. Signal isn't hurting adoption of federated tooling, Signal is stealing mindshare from for-profit data hoarders, and that's something I can wholeheartedly endorse even with their imperfections.